


i have learned and dismantled all the words

by lepidopteran



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gay Feelings, M/M, diaspora feelings, experiencing emotions, i've been through the door of truth and i can write fanfiction without a transmutation circle, language feelings, name feelings, survivor feelings, working title: gayshval
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 01:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14509599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lepidopteran/pseuds/lepidopteran
Summary: What are you called when you lose your name?





	i have learned and dismantled all the words

**Author's Note:**

> title from mahmoud darwish because i'm extra:
> 
> I have a moon past the peak of words.  
> I have the godsent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the kent of time.  
> I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.  
> I come from there, I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.  
> I have learned the words of blood-stained courts in order to break the rules.  
> I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:  
> Home

The public of Amestris take to calling him “the Ishvalan.” His first response is confusion. _There are many other Ishvalans_ , he tells Major Miles, whose mouth twists with amusement.

“But you’re famous,” the Major says. _Infamous_ is what he hears.

Within the confines of his own thoughts, he learns not to call himself by any name. It becomes easier and easier to forget. He introduces himself: _I am an associate of the Amestrian liaison to the Ishvalan people_ ; _I am here with Major Miles_ ; _I am the man you’re looking for_.

He never says _I am the one who killed the Fuhrer King_ ; _Once I was a man of God_ ; _I am a survivor_.

Major Miles calls him “you.”

“Armstrong will meet you at the station.” _Alright, Major._

“Can you ask Sheska if she knows of that text?” _Yes, Major._

“Are you coming to lunch?” _Not today, Major._

“Don’t forget your umbrella.” _I don’t carry one._ “Oh? You can share mine.” _No thank you, Major._

“You know, you don’t have to wear those shades anymore.” _So I’ve heard, Major._

“Of course, you know Ishval better than I do.” _Perhaps, Major._

But most people he fought beside still know him as Scar: the Elric brothers, the Rockbell girl, the chimera abominations. They no longer spit and hiss the name like a slur. They say it in a tone not quite friendly, but familiar. These Amestrians have grown all too familiar. He never corrects them.

Familiar. There’s something almost comfortable about _Scar._ It’s a simple fact. It’s there when he looks in the mirror. It’s there when he wipes the sweat off his brow, hiking through the desert beside the Major. It’s there when he complains that his hair is falling into his eyes, and in the dim lantern-light inside their tent, the Major offers to give him an impromptu shave. He’s only just begun, when the edge of the razorblade glances too close to the ghost of a gash.

Memory of a flare of light and the burn of blood in his eyes. He stumbles back, hand clenching too hard around the Major’s wrist. He hears a quick, low string of gentle words that he can’t parse; some comfort he’s not ready to hear.

He grows his hair.

*

It’s on a trip to the Ishvalan ghettos in Table City that Major Miles first slips up. It’s less a name and more a moniker, really. Nothing outrageous, something the Major perhaps calls many others, but it catches him off guard.

When he sees the poverty and abuse his people still suffer on this border city, sees their squalid homes and skinny children, he feels the old rage surge inside him, feels the muscles clench under his disused tattoos.

Then he feels a firm press between his shoulder blades; the contour of the Major’s hand. “This is why we came here, _rafiq._ ”

The Ishvalan word for comrade. A word he hasn’t heard since the days of the rebellion. Hearing it in that flat Northern accent makes his heart lurch, but not with the anger he would have imagined -- if he could have imagined the Major saying such a thing.

After that first time, the Major persists.

“Bring a doctor, rafiq. And hurry.” _You think I’d dawdle, Major?_

“Rafiq, you’ve got to try the flan.” _Major, you know I don’t like sweets._

“Do you know this dance, rafiq?” _It’s been a long time, Major_.

The Amestrians who overhear assume it’s a name, and they take to calling him Rafiq too. He hates to hear it in their voices, and he doesn’t let himself wonder why he doesn’t feel the same ire toward the Major. He tells them: _that’s not my name._

“So sorry -- what _is_ your name?”

He doesn’t answer.

*

They share a trek over the mountains with a nomadic group of monastics. He finds relief in the company of monks, who only call him _brother_ or _child._ As they stop to pass around a waterskin on an achingly hot day, the elderly abbot pulls him aside.

“Why do you dishonor your friend?”

_I don’t know what you’re talking about._

“He calls you his rafiq. You speak to him like a foreigner”

There are many words in Ishvalan for foreigner, because there is so much that is foreign. The monk chooses not the neutral _‘ajnabi_ , nor the vicious _ferenji_. He says _ghurayb_. Stranger.

The word echoes in his head for days, with all its distance, all its alienation. It’s been a long time since anyone was someone other than a stranger.

Some unnumbered days later, he wakes as always to dawn light filtering in through the thin linen that makes up their tent. At dawn, the man asleep a foot away is not the Major, but a soft animal wrapped in a thin blanket, sand-white hair undone and sticky with sweat, breathing in time with the whistle of wind between the dunes.

Dawn is the time to go out and search for the hardy plants that hold water in thick skins. Late enough that the wild dogs have returned to their hollows; early enough that the sun doesn’t yet burn and priceless dew still clings to the smooth green spines of those plants: so familiar to him, so strange to the man he travels with.

He’s about to step into his boots when a hand catches his ankle (small enough to only reach half around, grip loose but insistent).

“Scorpions,” the Northern voice says, slurred by sleep, gravelled by thirst. “Careful, rafiq.”

He doesn’t bother to say that the scorpions will stay close to the shadows until nightfall, or that he long ago learned the hiding places they favor, or that he’s faster and sharper and harder, more venomous.

_I’ll be back before you know it, Miles._

His voice catches and almost stumbles on the name, but what else could he say? He’s sure that Miles can feel the pulse jumping in his ankle, before his hand falls away.

When he returns with cactus fruits and succulent spikes, cut loose with a new-forged knife that has never seen blood, Miles greets him with a wide and lopsided smile.

He repeats it in his mind until it becomes not compulsion, but habit. It measures the rhythm of his boots in the sand. _Miles. Miles. Miles._

*

He goes to lengths to avoid the official functions in Central to which they are often invited, and Miles has become practiced at making excuses on his behalf. But this time, he draws a line.

“Grumman himself particularly asked after you. You’ll have to show that handsome face sometime.”

His own hand rises to trace his scar, involuntary. He knows what he looks like, and he knows that teasing is Miles’ native tongue. But Miles catches his eye in the mirror, and abruptly moves in close to help do up the collar-ties on his confining formal jacket. When brown fingers lightly graze over a brown neck, he finds himself wondering for the first time if the touch is accidental.

He looks back on a history of ( _strange, familiar_ ) touches. Warning touches, comforting touches, grounding touches. The kind shared between friends; the kind he thought was lost to him.

“I know you won’t come for Grumman.” Miles finishes knotting the cord, and lightly pushes him back to look him over. “So come for me, rafiq. It’s boring without you.”

Now he sits stiffly between Miles and Armstrong at the long banquet table. Whoever set the seating chart took care to keep him at a safe distance from the war criminals, although he can hear the Flame Alchemist’s snide commentary a few seats down.

Miles lays a hand on his elbow and squeezes. “Try unclenching your jaw and eating something, rafiq.”

“Rafiq,” Armstrong says in his other ear, accent atrocious, booming voice startling him out of the unsettling feeling of lightness that always accompanies Miles’ touch. “What does that mean, Major?”

Miles tilts his head back, as if considering. “I’d say that the closest analog in Amestrian is _companion._ It’s a term of endearment, I suppose.”

Sentimental tears well at the corners of Armstrong’s blue eyes. The ground feels suddenly unstable.

_That’s not a correct translation._

“ _Rafiqi_ \--”

The possessive suffix: _my_ rafiq, my comrade, my _\--_

He’s already out of the high-backed chair, moving away and away. Hurt is transparent on Miles’ face, usually so composed. His eyes are wide; the irises bright, bright red.

_Don’t speak my language if you don’t know what you say._

*

 _My_ language. As though he can claim anything, as if he can claim Ishval. He, who has committed in his time the worst of crimes, has become a self-made exile and an infidel, who would share a table and break bread with the very same _ferenji_ who slaughtered his people, razed his home from the ground, tore his only brother from him.

Miles did none of those things. His eyes are red, not blue. His skin is the color of a sandstone house. In the past months, he has taken to praying over their shared meals. He speaks the language of Ishval like neither a foreigner nor a native, but like a man coming home for the very first time.

The word _rafiq_ sounds right on his tongue, and more right every day.

The translation was correct, strictly. An older connotation, almost lost, that aches with the memory of a closeness impossible in wartime, an intimacy incongruous with violence.

_He calls you his rafiq and you treat him like a ghurayb._

It is not an intimacy he has the capacity to receive, or give in return. He lost that long ago, when he lost his right to a name.

*

He takes a formal leave according to official procedure.

Mei has grown two full inches. Xiao-Mei hasn’t grown at all. When they leap into his arms and cling to him, he almost forgets to feel unworthy of a family.

The young Emperor of Xing is not too busy to insist on throwing him a party, which is a raucous and not at all formal affair.

“ _Scar!_ The man of the hour!” Ling slides up to him with a glass in hand, throws an arm easily around his shoulders, not relenting when he stiffens. “Try this.”

_I don’t drink._

“Non-alcoholic.” Ling taps the side of his nose. “My own invention. Well, Al helped.”

Yes -- the younger Elric brother is here as well. He spends most of his time at Mei’s elbow, and doesn’t flinch at a red-eyed warning stare. Even returned to his proper body, there’s a wrongness that clings to him, that raises the hairs on a pair of tattooed arms. A line was crossed that can’t be passed over again. But no one here is without a past.

He tentatively takes the glass. The liquid is fizzy and too sweet. He passes it back.

“It’s just water, with a little flare. Isn’t alchemy _marvelous?_ ”

What’s a marvel is that anyone can live through the hell-on-earth they have, and emerge on the other side, young and healthy, happy, even _joyful_ , with sparkling eyes and a gaggle of friends.

He’s traveled farther and longer. He’s too far gone for this.

“Scar,” Alphonse Elric says at his elbow, voice as sweet and high as ever. “You don’t have to stay.”

He leaves the doors to the extravagant hall swinging behind him.

*

The first letter arrives before the end of his third week in Xing. Miles’ handwriting is still a childish scrawl, but his vocabulary has improved. “Don’t be so stubborn,” he writes, and, “You know you can come home whenever you like.”

Several more letters follow soon after, to more or less the same effect. None of them carries a salutation by any name. The disastrous endearment is nowhere to be seen.

Miles doesn’t even sign his own name. But there’s no one else who would write such things.

“Pay my respects to the Emperor and tell him to send you back.”

“Bring Mei if you like.”

“Come home.”

With each letter, the tone becomes heavier.

“I can’t do this without you and you damn well know it. Be angry with me, but don’t make your people suffer for it.”

He crumples the letter, unfolds it, smooths the wrinkles, folds it again into neat quarters, thumbs pressing hard at the creases, tucks it back in its envelope.

He taps his brush against the inkpad twice in thought, before he writes on the back of the envelope with an easy flick of his wrist:

_They’ve suffered me long enough._

Another month passes. No letters come. Mei takes him on long walks through the city. He watches her and the Elric boy trace alkahestry circles in the palace courtyard, and restrains himself from coming between them. He gets a haircut from a Xingese barber -- just the sides, all blades staying well clear of his forehead -- and knots a ponytail at the nape of his neck. The latest fashion in the Empire, he’s told.

The city doesn’t agree with him; crowded, noisy, and humid. Nor does the palace, with its gilt and silk. But the Emperor keeps horses, and one week they ride together high into the mountains, where the air is crisp and birds chatter in fir trees. Ling is remarkably quiet here, spending long hours with his trouser-legs rolled up and his feet kicking in the river, saying nothing.

On the ride back down to the city, he feels certain he sees more clearly. Light seems brighter. He breaths more slowly. Some time away from confining houses, manicured gardens, banquet tables and baths, and he feels more human. It is all the trappings of humanity that make him feel less so: homes, friends, names.

So when Mei hands him the letter -- or rather, flings it at him -- it takes a moment to recognize what it is.

“This came for you! I wonder what it is.”

In his disorientation he unfolds it right away, careless of privacy.

The letter is one long scribble, mostly indecipherable, but he can make out the words _please,_ and _lonely_ , and _goddamn._ Several words are scribbled out -- whether to correct a misspelling or retract a thought, he doesn’t know. Others are smudged beyond recognition.

At the bottom of the page, one word is clear, the calligraphy atypically elegant, from a brush moved slowly and with special care. _Wahashtani._

It means, “I miss you.”

He grew up in a village where everyone knew him; knew his name, knew his family, saw him daily at the temple or in the market or around a shared table. Then he left for the monastery, where he prayed and studied side by side with the same few men, day in and day out. In the rebellion, he fought beside comrades he couldn’t bear to imagine parting with, and who wouldn’t think of parting from him.

And later, as a nameless man with a distorted face --

In all his life, no one has ever said this to him: wahashtani. No one ever had cause to.

He clutches the letter tightly. Mei is at his elbow, sneaking glimpses, pointing to each word and loudly begging a translation. He hardly hears her.

Though shaking, his hands move of their own volition, by muscle memory: he shoves the sheet of paper back into its envelope, as he always does. Only then does he see a scrawled addendum across the front of the envelope -- below the formal address in carefully copied Xingese characters, above the official stamp of the Amestrian insignia. A few Ishvalan words, bared for the world to see.

_Ila rafiq ‘umri._

“What does _that_ mean?” Mei jabs her pudgy finger at the words.

He answers half to himself, mouth moving slowly around the words.

_To my life companion. Or -- it could also be translated -- but no --_

“What?” Mei presses him, eyes bright and keen, unaware of all the history behind those words but far from ignorant of their gravity.

_To Rafiq, I give my life._

*

The sun hangs just over the distant mountains and casts an orange glow through the kitchen window, lighting half of Miles’ face where he stands at the stove, stirring a saucepan on a low flame. It smells of earthy cumin and fresh green coriander. It smells like childhood, and a place that once was home. Here, in one of a long line of row-houses at the outskirts of Central City, it smells like Ishval.

He does not mean to spend so long standing there, staring through the window. But his boots are rooted in the unkempt yard, unwilling to move close enough to feel the warmth indoors and find out if it’s meant for him.

When Miles looks up from his cooking, his eyes are such a vivid red, a lifeblood-red, and suddenly it is all so much, and so clear: burning eyes, sharp coriander, sun over mountains, the huff of a horse’s breath, sore feet in worn leather, an empty stomach, an aching heart, an inviting home, a startled and joyful cry.

“Rafiqi!”

There are not enough words in any language to explain himself, his absence then, his presence now. But across from him are those gleaming eyes and that lopsided smile, and between them, a spread of food he can’t believe was prepared as a meal for one. Flatbread dusted with sumac, hot from the oven. Dark sour olives. After the meal, spiced coffee.

_It’s like you knew I was coming._

Miles’ smile only widens, so that it can’t be hidden behind his china cup.

When they clear the dishes, it’s past nightfall and crickets chirp outside the window. Miles lights a lamp, carefully curving his hand around the match as he lowers it to wick. Watching the warm light flicker on his brown face, fire looks suddenly different than it did before.

The words _nour el ein_ beg to be spoken. Light of my eye. But instead he says,

_Do we have room for a horse?_

The Emperor wouldn’t take no for an answer, citing the long and arduous trek across the desert and the urgency of his return, and finishing, “And you _love_ this horse. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

On cue, the mare’s long face with its wide white stripe looms in the window, her breath fogging the glass. Miles glances at her, then back at him. His demeanor is grave.

“So you’re staying?”

He stumbles on his words, only then realizing how presumptuous he must seem, not to mention how much his careless question revealed. _I didn’t mean --_

“Oh, don’t you dare _._ You don’t get to be lonely anymore. Have you _ever_ thought that I might be lonely too?”

Miles moves towards him, and he braces himself for a deserved blow, the kind he knows well that Miles can throw with ease -- but instead he feels thumbs trace his close-shaved head on either side, just above the ears, feeling out its contours.

And in a flash, he feels an overpowering heat against his scar -- they are forehead to forehead, Miles solid and unyielding. His eyes close.

_You made a pun._

“What the hell?” The curse is a soft breath that just brushes his upper lip.

The words aren’t easy to get out, his tongue suddenly heavy, the smell of sweat dizzying, the warmth and pressure against his forehead something like unbearable. But not so much that he wants it to end. _Ila -- rafiq -- ‘umri --_

Miles huffs, coffee and cardamom on his breath. “So you did get my letters.”

_You do know the language -- well, so well. Better than I do, and I wish I could learn it again the way you’ve learned it._

“Like a man in love?”

_I’ll have to learn it again._

Miles pulls back, but his hands stay weighted on his shoulders. “Look in my eyes.”

He does. It’s a crime that those eyes were hidden away for so long.

“If we’re doing this, I’ll call you whatever I like.”

He looks over that angular face, weathered by years of sun glare on snow and more recent years of wind in the desert, new wrinkles cast in contrast by the candlelight. He watches the thin mouth press into a firm line, and he wants to hear that mouth shape every single syllable the grace of Ishval gave them. But there is only one thing, now, to say.

_Yes._

Call me everything, and let no one else ever again call me anything at all.

*

“Have you met my companion?”

**Author's Note:**

> all the "ishvalan" vocab is arabic (although not all the grammar is) because uh. that's what i know and i'm lazy
> 
> i wrote this for my partner because there's a tragic and shameful dearth of work for this pairing and they had a powerful need to read about our favorite emotionally constipated terrorist. i hope you feel the same way


End file.
